Presidential Election

Image, issues compete to sway voter sentiment

Candidates’ impressions can be crux of tight race

Along with driving Democrats to distraction, the campaign "bounce" enjoyed by Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin has renewed old questions about how presidential contests are won and lost.

Does the personal (the heroic McCain biography, the feisty Palin persona) trump the partisan (an election climate that sharply favors the other side)?

Do attributes trump issues?

"This election is not about issues," McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis told the Washington Post this month, but about a "composite view of what people take away from these candidates - their values, their character, their opinions, their principles."

Just how decisive are character and likeability in presidential elections?

Political scientists aren't entirely in agreement on the subject.

"Clearly what we saw in the elections of 2000 and 2004, which we looked at very closely, was that the personal liabilities of the Democratic candidates, Gore and Kerry, were a very big factor in the outcome," says Helmut Norpoth, co-author of "The American Voter Revisited," a sweeping study of voting behavior that focused heavily on those races. "Sometimes it's much less than character. Sometimes it's (more) superficial - it's personal qualities," he says.

In both of those contests, Republican George W. Bush had an edge with voters on key attributes such as honesty and decisiveness, according to polls by Gallup and others. Did that tip the outcomes? It's impossible to say for certain.

But part of the current hand-wringing among Democrats over the McCain-Palin surge is their fear that something similar could happen again - that they could lose the struggle over the candidates' public image, at a time when their party has the edge on key policy issues, on party identification and on the country's desire for change.

In a recent post-convention Gallup poll, Republican McCain led Democrat Barack Obama on five of eight questions about character and personal qualities, including being a "strong and decisive leader," "honest and trustworthy" and putting "the country's interests ahead of his own political interests." Obama led on two attributes, including "cares about the needs of people like you," while the two were essentially tied on independence.

Opinions changeable

Those numbers could easily change, of course. They have bounced around before. To this point, neither candidate appears to dominate on measures of overall likeability. And in Obama, Democrats have a candidate whose personal attributes and charisma have been huge political assets, just as Palin's are right now for the Republicans.

In last Sunday's New York Times, columnist David Brooks wrote that "Most voters, especially ones who decide late, vote on character over policies."

That may be stretching the point. In fact, there's broad agreement among scholars who study campaigns that party preference, combined with underlying conditions such as the economy, explains the behavior of most voters from election to election.

But for a smaller subset of voters - more independent, less engaged, later to commit - judgments about the candidate's character or other personal traits may override their partisan leanings.

Person vs. party

Sam Popkin, a well-known scholar in the field, says there's an important interplay between voters' feelings about party and their feelings about the "person."

"The person matters," Popkin says. "You can overstate it, but it's a very big part of figuring out whether this guy will take care of your worries about the party."

In other words, the candidate's personal image can amplify or offset a voter's doubts about the party he or she represents. That's why, as a general rule, "Republicans have to prove they have a heart and Democrats have to prove they have guts," says Popkin, a University of California-San Diego professor who has advised Democratic presidential candidates.

Daron Shaw, a University of Texas political scientist who helped the Bush campaign in 2000 and 2004, agrees.

"The Republican tends to dominate leadership traits. The Democrat tends to dominate empathy traits," says Shaw. There's some evidence, he says, that "if Democrats can do well on leadership, or if Republicans can hold leadership and do OK on empathy, they win. The electoral payoff for doing well on the other guy's dimension is disproportionate."

Downplay issues

Running on character and biography makes eminent sense for McCain, says Shaw.

"He's saying, 'We're going to have a hard time winning the issue agenda. We need to do the best we can there, and then make sure personal judgments and records are critical to evaluating who the best candidate is,' " Shaw says.

Popkin makes a similar point.

Touting independence and "straight talk" and "country first" is a way "to try to separate yourself from your party," Popkin says, since that's much harder for McCain to do on the issues.

Citing the comment by McCain's campaign manager that "this election is not about issues," the Obama camp has accused McCain of running a diversionary race, marked by ads and claims that have drawn frequent criticism from nonpartisan fact-checkers.

"His campaign has become nothing but a series of smears, lies, and cynical attempts to distract from the issues that matter to the American people," Obama's campaign manger David Plouffe said in a statement Friday.

The two nominees have gone after each other on these personal dimensions. McCain has painted Obama as a celebrity, elitist and lightweight. In a new advertising offensive launched Friday, Obama skewered McCain for being so "out of touch" he "still doesn't know how to use a computer" and "still doesn't understand the economy."

Four years ago, the Bush re-election campaign put attributes at the core of its ad strategy, portraying the incumbent president as decisive and steadfast and opponent Kerry as just the opposite.

"I think we really went more to attributes, they went more to issues," Bush ad man Mark McKinnon said in interview with the Journal Sentinel after the 2004 election. "If you look at the language, the theme, the ideas, it's really much more about strength, trust, values. . . . We recognized what we had to find was the voter who would say at the end of the day, 'You know, I don't always agree with this president, but I know where he stands, I know where he's going, and that's important in a president in times like these.' "

Palin factor

McCain's current task is similar in some ways but perhaps more urgent, since he is running in a poorer political environment than Bush did. Also, Popkin argues, personal attributes take on more importance for non-incumbents, who are less defined in the public's mind.

"I probably would say it's those personal qualities that candidates bring that probably make the most difference at the margins" in a close race, says Norpoth, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

What's been so unusual about the last two weeks of this campaign is not the role personality and character have played, but the role a running mate's personality and persona have played. Palin has both overshadowed the two nominees and, in McCain's case, boosted his image as well. Her youth, gender, personal background (working mother of five) and unconventional résumé (Washington outsiders are almost never chosen for vice president) seem to have helped McCain deflect attacks about being old and out of touch and "more of the same."

"It's very hard to talk about anything else other than her personality," former Bush strategist Matt Dowd told ABC's Diane Sawyer last week.